Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter's Civil War Lyrics

Abstract

Hester Pulter composed her verse during the 1640s and 1650s in a kind of royalist retirement at her country home of Broadfield, Hertfordshire, and her biographical isolation is mirrored in a poetic preoccupation with loss. Contributing to the sense that her verse might encapsulate a ‘female aesthetic’ of retreat (a phrase that has been used of male, royalist devotional writers) is the predominance in her verse of a discourse of sighs and tears. In this paper, however, I will argue that the sighs and tears of Pulter's lyrics in fact constitute a significant, gendered, female reaction to political events. In a self-construction drawing on Francis Quarles’ emblematic representation of Esther, Hester Pulter constructs a notion of godly fame, in which her poetic sighs and tears provide a consolatory example for other royalist readers.